Scott Veitch on The Art of Complicity (Law and Literature)

"The Art of Complicity"
Scott Veitch
Law & Literature
Published online: March 2025

Abstract: This article considers the relation between art and complicity in wrongdoing. To do so, it offers a series of reflections on the theme of ‘Apollo and Daphne’, a story told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and given sculptural form in the seventeenth century by Gianlorenzo Bernini. By understanding Bernini’s creation within the political, legal, and religious conflicts of its time, it analyses how artworks resonate in their ambient culture and beyond. Finally, it addresses the relationships amongst art, artist, and audiences and the risk of complicity in wrongdoing they share.

Stacy Douglas & Dan Matthews on Sovereignty, Affect and Being-Bound (new book chapter)

"Sovereignty, affect and being-bound"

Stacy Douglas &  Daniel Matthews

in Daniel Matthews & Scott Veitch (eds), Law, Obligation, Community (Routledge, June 2018), Chapter 7, 22 pages

Introduction: If ever it left us, sovereignty has returned. The protectionist and nativist instincts that helped propel Donald Trump into office have been felt throughout the Western world as new nationalisms have forced themselves into the political mainstream. The promise of post-national identities, global flows of people and capital, and the weakening of the ‘bright lines’ of state control have been met by a forceful resistance that foregrounds local interests and concerns, often depends on ethnically defined notions of identity and clings fervently to nationalistic histories and modes of belonging. Whilst we might dismiss some of these movements as being motivated by atavistic fears of difference, there is a powerful sense that the events of 2016 represent the high watermark for the form of turbo-charged globalisation let loose as the Berlin Wall fell and the ‘new world order’ took hold in the early 1990s. As Kyle McGee argues, the West is suffering from a loss of both ‘place’ and ‘land’ as the dual forces of globalisation and global warming put extant forms of attachment to locale and community under erasure (McGee 2017). In such conditions, the allure of sovereignty with its promise to ‘take back control’, as the Brexit campaign had it, is quite understandable. If ‘waning sovereignty’ (Brown 2014) has accompanied these ‘twin vertigoes of placelessness and landlessness’ (McGee 2017, p. 128), its recent revival offers – some would believe – a line of defence against the forces of globalisation and the increasing precarity this brings. Against this background we engage with the theme of obligation in two ways.

     First, we explore the ways in which juridically enforceable obligations installed and defended by modern constitutional sovereignty are crucial to giving shape to the affective life of a community. We approach sovereignty through the sentiments that it produces – or claims to produce – and the particular effect that it has in enframing the world and giving scope to a sense of our political attachments and modes of belonging. We dwell on the sensibilities associated with sovereignty and on how the mobilisation of the rights and duties associated with the protection of sovereignty affectively enframes the way a political community attaches to place, past and an imagined future. 

     Second, continuing our emphasis on the register of affect, we explore a sense of ‘being-bound’ that both precedes and exceeds juridically defined obligations. The binding quality of obligations – evidenced in the root word ligare, which we find in ligature, ligament, allegiance and religion – limited notion of an obligation at law. It is this more expansive sense of ‘being-bound’ that we explore in what follows, underscoring the affective, political and existential dimensions to the bonds that give form to collective life. Ultimately, we are interested in unsettling the affective life of sovereignty, in revealing and attuning our selves to a sense of ‘being-bound’ that challenges sovereignty’s power to recentre an autonomous legal subject, and its attendant national community, within an anthropocentric horizon. Such a horizon is today increasingly compromised. In particular, the ‘twin vertigoes’ of globalisation and climatic change ought to attune us to a set of relations that transcend the assumed bifurcation between human and non-human life, ushering in a sensitivity to the bonds that sustain habitability beyond the limited set of relations honoured by modern sovereignty. 

     We find possibilities for such an unsettling of sovereignty’s affective force in artistic practices coming out of South Africa, namely in the work of J. M. Coetzee and Nandipha Mntambo, and explore the implications of their work for rethinking what it means to ‘be-bound’ beyond the juridical proscriptions associated with sovereignty. The complex challenges associated with the constitutional settlement in South Africa is not our central concern. Rather, by attending to the practices of two artists working within this context we hope to shed light on a broader problematic. The oldest questions of legal and political theory – the nature of the body politic, the territorial limits of political power and the aspirations of the common good – are today being reposed with a renewed urgency. It is our contention that turning to art and literature helps unseat the predominant affective disposition installed by contemporary juridico-political techniques. We think that the South African case, as it has been tumultuously unfolding for the past nearly 25 years, can offer some important insights here, especially as it demonstrates how the affective force of sovereignty reaffirms a deeply held anthropocentricism that we must today begin to challenge if we are to avoid an eternal return of well-worn scripts that equate constitutional sovereignty with justice. We begin by unpacking our approach to affect before moving to discuss sovereignty, South Africa, Coetzee and Mntambo.

Marco Wan on the Artwork of Hong Kong's Occupy Central Movement (new book chapter)

"The Artwork of Hong Kong's Occupy Central Movement"

Marco Wan
in Michael Ng and John wong (eds), Civil Unrest and Governance in Hong Kong: Law and Order from Historical and Cultural Perspectives (Routledge, June 2017), pp. 179-195
Introduction: Hong Kong’s Occupy Central movement, or the Umbrella Revolution as it became known in the international media, was an event that changed the city’s cultural fabric. From its origins as a peaceful protest against the package of electoral reforms imposed on the city by Beijing, as well as against the city’s slow pace of democratization more generally, it turned into an event that divided Hong Kong society in an unprecedented way, exposing divisions between people of different generations, political persuasions and aspirations. As the title of this volume indicates, any form of civil unrest has implications for the maintenance of law and order, and much of the local discussion of Occupy Central has focused on its legal dimension. For instance, there have been lively debates about whether it constituted a form of civil disobedience, as its organizers claimed, or whether it was merely a form of reckless public disorder for which they should have been punished. There have also been concerns about the abuse of police powers and whether the authorities used an inordinate amount of force to contain the protesters.
     Another strand of the discussion around Occupy Central has focused on its artwork. As one online art magazine noted during the movement, ‘colors abound [on] the streets […] as protesters create public art and turn occupied areas into surreal exhibition spaces. Arguably the most iconic artwork was the ten-foot-tall wooden statue of the Umbrella Man by the artist Milk. This towering figure with an outstretched hand holding the symbolic umbrella of protest became an artistic focal point for the movement. However, the street art produced during Occupy Central extends far beyond the Umbrella Man, encompassing a plethora of hand-drawn pictures, printed images and graffiti. There was keen awareness that once the government cleared the streets, much of this artwork would be lost. The Umbrella Movement Art Preservation project, or UMAP, was established as a way of archiving and preserving these images, although at the time of writing its digital archive is still under construction.
     This chapter moves beyond discussions of Occupy Central’s legality to explore the cultural significance of some of the images that this momentous event generated. Civil unrest cannot be understood in isolation from the societal forces that produced it, and the artwork of Occupy Central provides one medium for understanding such forces. This chapter therefore focuses on the movement’s aesthetic, rather than political or legal, dimension. It argues that its street art provides a point of entry into questions of identity in Hong Kong. In other words, the images can be interpreted as reflections of the ways in which Occupy Central perceived itself, as well as the ways in which some Hong Kongers imagined their own sense of self. These images suggest that Occupy Central was an event that did not have a unitary or unambiguous notion of itself, and that this multifaceted self-conception may be tied to the complex sense of self amongst many Hong Kongers in the early part of the twenty first century. 

Executive Course: Stolen Goods, Forgeries and Loot (HKU, 6-7 March 2017)

EXECUTIVE COURSE 

Stolen Goods, Forgeries and Loot: Intersections of Art, Law and Crime 

Monday 6th – Tuesday 7th March 2017
10:00 – 17:30

Academic Conference Room, 11/F Cheng Yu Tung Tower,
Centennial Campus The University of Hong Kong 

The University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law is pleased to announce its first Executive Course on Art, Law and Crime. The Course will comprise of two days of intensive interactive workshops (for a total of 10 hours), with a focus on stolen goods, forgeries and loot. Attendees will receive a certificate upon completion of the course. 

The course will be led by the following Discussants: 

 Dr. Saskia Hufnagel, Senior Lecturer in Criminal Law and Co-Director of the Criminal Justice Centre (CJC) at Queen Mary University of London. Saskia is currently a Visiting Fellow with HKU’s Centre for Comparative and Public Law. Saskia was a Research Fellow at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Policing and Security, Griffith University, Australia, and was a Leverhulme Fellow at the University of Leeds. Whilst completing her PhD, she taught at the ANU College of Law and between 2009 and 2011 she held a permanent teaching position at the University of Canberra. She is an accredited German legal professional specialising in criminal law.  

 Dr. Rebecca Wong, Assistant Professor at City University of Hong Kong. Rebecca completed her PhD studies at the Department of Sociology, University of Oxford. Her primary research interests are in the fields of green criminology, environmental crime, illegal endangered wildlife trade, criminal networks and issues of trust in the underworld. She is also an associate member of the Extra Legal Governance Institute and the Elephant Research & Conservation Network, University of Oxford. 

 Toby J.A. Bull has a BA (Hons) in ‘Fine Arts Valuation’ and a MSc in ‘Risk, Crisis & Disaster Management’. He is a certified art authenticator, having studied at the Centre for Cultural Material Conservation and graduated from the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is widely published in the art crime field and is a very experienced lecturer in the subject. Since 1993, he has worked for the Hong Kong Police Force. Toby is a Freeman of The Worshipful Company of Arts Scholars and holds the Freedom of the City of London.  

Fees: 

(1) The fee for the Executive Course is HK$4,000 per person, payable upon registration. 

(2) Students will enjoy a discounted fee of HK$1,600 per person. Proof of student status should be submitted with the cheque (Copy of Student ID). 

(3) Those wishing to attend the Executive Course should register here. Cheques should be made payable to “The University of Hong Kong” with your full name and telephone number written on the back of the cheque and sent to Ms. Joyce Fung at Room 921, 9/F Cheng Yu Tung Tower, Centennial Campus, The University of Hong Kong. 

(4) Registration will be completed upon the receipt of the course fee by the Centre for Comparative and Public Law and a confirmation email will be sent to you to advise you accordingly. Receipts for payment will be available for collection on the first day of the course from the registration desk in the morning. 

(5) No refund will be provided for any course fees paid once registration has been confirmed. 

(6) We are currently applying to the Law Society of Hong Kong for CPD points for the course. 

(7) Inquiries may be addressed to Ms. Joyce Fung at joycef@hku.hk.